Castille matched his speed. “This is very easy!” he said, voice distorted even over the short distance. “All those years I wasted using my legs to swim…”

“Just don’t crack your head straight into the wall,” Chase cautioned cheerfully. “Kari, you okay?”

She swept past him, effortlessly rolling in a lazy corkscrew motion. “Who do you think helped design these suits? I have other passions besides archaeology and architecture!”

“I do like a passionate boss,” joked Chase. The temple was approaching quickly, taking on color in their suit lights. “Okay, slow down.”

“Eddie, I can’t see anything except the seabed,” Nina complained over the radio. “How close are you to the temple?”

Chase let go of the controller and brought himself upright, aiming the camera on his shoulder at the building ahead. “About so close. You seeing that?”

“Oh, definitely,” she replied, awed.

The trio touched down less than ten feet from where the sloping wall rose from the piled sediment. Ragged sheets of orichalcum glinted under their spotlights. Fish darted over the temple’s surface, oblivious to the ancient power it represented.

“Which way to the entrance?” Chase asked.

“About six meters to your left,” Baillard said.

The group headed for it, Chase and Kari using powerful flashlights as well as their suit lights. Chase glanced back at the Atragon. Although he could see its spotlights clearly, as well as the unearthly pulse of its scanning lasers, the sub itself was barely visible in the deep gloom.

“There!” said Kari. Her light shone on the opening.

Chase crouched as best he could, directing his own light inside. It wasn’t as far as he’d expected to the vertical shaft; the fish-eye effect of the ROV’s camera had exaggerated the distance. “Okay, I’ll go first. Hugo, hook me up.” Castille connected a tether from a reel on his equipment belt to a clip on the lower back of Chase’s suit. “If there isn’t enough room to get around the bend in the shaft, pull me out.”

Castille yanked on the tether to make sure it was properly connected, then moved to the far side of the entrance so it wouldn’t become tangled in the communications line. “If you ate more fruit and less steak, you wouldn’t be worrying about getting stuck.”

“You know where you can shove your fruit… Okay, here I go.”

Kari and Castille helped him to a horizontal position, guiding him into the opening. Flashlight in his extended right hand, Chase took the controls with his left and started the thrusters on low power. The stone walls crept past. Under normal circumstances a four-foot-wide passage would have been easy to negotiate even underwater, but the unbending bulk of the deep suit made him more cautious.

It wasn’t long before he reached the end of the passage. He rolled onto his back to look up the shaft. It stretched away into blackness. “I’m at the shaft. Shaft! Can you dig it?” Nina groaned. “Going to try to head up.”

The corner was tight, his helmet scraping against the wall, but he levered himself upright without too much difficulty. “I’m through!” he announced, relieved. “Let’s see what’s up here.”

He activated the thrusters again, the ducted propellers whirring quietly as he rose. The shaft was at least thirty feet high, the walls sheer. Looking up, he saw the dark square where Mighty Jack had come to a stop-where air had been trapped by the rising water. It was only three feet above him now, two, one…

He broke the surface, water streaming down his faceplate. Shining the light, he saw he was about six feet short of the top of the shaft, a black void above him.

No problem. He clipped the flashlight back onto his equipment belt and brought up one of his other items-a gas-powered grappling gun. Bobbing awkwardly like a giant cork in the confines of the shaft, he aimed it over the top of the south wall, then fired.

The thump of gas echoed through the shaft as the grapnel shot upwards. A few seconds later, he heard it clank against stone. He worked the controls to wind in the cable. After a tense wait, the grapnel caught on something. He pulled it a couple of times to check it was secure, then attached the gun’s strap to his suit and pulled himself up, the motor whining in protest at the weight.

The top was just a few feet above him now, opening out into…

“Look at that!” Nina gasped. She watched the video feed intently, barely blinking. The view from Chase’s camera revealed the altar chamber, in dimensions an exact match for the one in Brazil.

In magnificence, however, it was something else entirely.

Even in the grainy, low-resolution video, she could clearly make out the red gleam of orichalcum, flashes of gold and silver, cat’s-eye sparkles from gemstones set into the walls…

“My God,” breathed Philby, “it’s incredible. The entire chamber must be lined with precious metals!”

“It’s not just decorative,” said Nina. She fiddled with her headset. “Eddie? Talk to me. What can you see?”

“I see… that if I had some tin snips and a crowbar, I could retire on this lot.”

“Very funny. Can you get closer to one of the walls?”

“Christ, let me get onto my feet first…” The video image jerked as Chase pulled himself out of the shaft and detached the cable gun, his breath rasping into his microphone. “Okay. Well, I was right about the shaft, it’s in the same place as the blocked one in Brazil. They must have used the same plans. The walls are… God, they’ve used the stuff like wallpaper. There’s sheet after sheet of orichalcum, and it’s all inscribed.”

“Let me see, let me see!” said Nina, bouncing in her chair in excitement.

Chase moved closer, his flashlight beam sliding over one section of wall. Nina immediately recognized the script: Glozel, though with none of the hieroglyphic symbols from the Brazilian temple.

Philby stroked his mustache as he peered at the screen. “Interesting. Maybe they assimilated the language of the Indians… The temple in Brazil would have taken years, even generations to build. That would be enough time for the two systems to intermix…”

“Eddie, give me a look at the whole chamber, please. Slowly.”

Chase stepped away from the wall and slowly turned in place, panning his camera around the room.

“Stop, stop!” Nina shouted, seeing something. “Back to the right a little bit… there! Go over there!”

“Now I know how Mighty Jack feels,” he complained amiably as he waddled across the room. “What’ve you seen? There’s nothing there.”

“Exactly!” The section of wall before Chase was sheathed in orichalcum like the rest of the chamber, but it was blank, the inscribed text stopping abruptly halfway down. “The whole chamber, it’s a record of Atlantis-but that’s where it ends! Which means whatever’s written there is the final record of the Atlanteans! Get closer, let me read it!” She hurriedly checked that the video feed was being recorded.

“Or you could let me unhook this rope from my arse and fix it to something so Hugo and Kari can climb up here as well,” said Chase. “You remember Kari? Attractive blonde, tall, has a camera?”

“Well, yeah, that might work too,” she replied, slightly deflated but still desperate to get the first look at what was written on the wall.

The first look. Nobody had set eyes on the text for over eleven thousand years…

She waited impatiently as Chase set things up. Finally he announced that Kari was on her way. “Okay, while we’re waiting, can you please go back to the final record?”

“You’re so domineering. I like that in a woman… sometimes,” he quipped, directing the camera at the text.

Nina looked across at Trulli. “Matt, is there any way to get a freeze-frame from the video?”

“Sure. The recorder’s digital, got a terabyte of storage-it’ll keep on recording. What screen do you want it on?”